A Contrastive Study Of The Appraisal Resources Between Chinese And English Commercial Advertisements

Based on the Appraisal Theory, this paper has made research on a contrastiveanalysis of Chinese and English commercial advertisements through combiningquantitative and qualitative approaches. The researcher has collected30Chinesecommercial advertisement texts and30English commercial advertisement textsrandomly from famous English magazines, such as Life Week and Reader’s Digest andso on. Then, the researcher identified and annotated the appraisal resources in these60advertisements within the framework of Appraisal Theory. A careful contrastiveanalysis has been carried out in terms of the three subsystems of Appraisal theory,which includes attitude, engagement and graduation.It is found that both the Chinese and English commercial advertisements enjoyabundant appraisal resources. There are326appraisal resources (with242attitudinalvalues,23of engagement values and61graduation values) in Chinese commercialadvertisements and364(with220attitudinal resources,64of engagement values and80graduation values) in English commercial advertisements. Through a contrastiveanalysis between these two advertisements discourses, we find that in the two selectedtexts, the distribution of appraisal resources is uneven and attitudinal resources arepredominantly fore-grounded than those of engagement and graduation.Within the system of attitude, there is a combination of positive and negativevalues of affect in the English texts, while the Chinese texts rarely use negativeattitudinal resources. The causes for this difference are the Chinese harmony valueand the Chinese taboo against using negative words. As to judgment, in the selectedChinese and English sample texts; the occurrence of judgment is rarely low. The mainreason is that both the Chinese and English commercial advertisement is designed topersuade the potential consumers to take the purchasing action, thus the advertisersintend to attach more importance to describe the goods or services other than people.In terms of engagement, the Chinese advertiser prefers to use resources ofdialogical contraction, while the English advertisers prefer to use the resources ofdialogical expansion. The most frequently used resource in the two discourses is Entertain, the second position is Deny, the third one is Counter and there are noAttribute resource both in the two texts because of the purposes of commercialadvertisement and the language features of. Besides the similarity, there exist thedifferences. The English advertisers use more Entertain resources than those ofChinese. The reason for this is that Chinese advertisement language rarely uses thosemodal expressions that express the possibility and uncertainty.In terms of graduation, the similarity is that in both the selected Chinese andEnglish commercial advertisements, there are more values of force than those of focusand more force-raise than force-lower, for both the commercial advertisements tend toimpress the readers deeply with the only help of written language.This thesis proves that Appraisal theory is effective not only in analyzing theEnglish advertisement, but also the Chinese commercial advertisement. Thecontrastive analysis of appraisal resources between English and Chinese commercialadvertising can be complementary to the previous studies of advertisement andcontrastive study between the Chinese and English. Practically, the present researchmay benefit the advertisement copywriters and the readers of both the twoadvertisements. On the one hand, the findings can be helpful for the creation of betterChinese and English commercial advertisements. On the other hand, it is helpful forreaders, especially consumers to have a better understanding of commercialadvertisement language. In addition, this research may shed light on the teaching ofEnglish advertisement discourse and intercultural communication research. At thesame time, it is expected that the research can shed some light on the translation ofChinese and English commercial advertisement.